EMORY
“Mo.”
I burrow deeper into the pillow.
“Mo. Wake up.”
His voice is low and warm. His lips brush my temple.
“No,” I mumble.
“I need you to get up.”
“It’s still dark.”
“I know.”
“Then why are we awake?”
“Because I want to take you somewhere.”
I crack one eye open. He’s already dressed.
Of course he is. Apparently a man who naturally wakes with the sun still wakes with the sun even after a night of very limited sleep and a truly impressive amount of physical exertion.
“Jake. We’ve barely had any sleep and my legs are incapable of moving.”
“You’ll want to see this.”
“What I want to see is the back of my eyelids for another few hours.”
He leans down and kisses me. The kind that makes my body wake up before the rest of me has agreed to it.
He pulls back just enough to look at me.
“That’s cheating,” I whisper.
“Is it working?”
I sigh. “I’m up.”
“So am I now.”
“Then come back to bed.”
“Tempting offer, but we have to be somewhere, and we have to leave now.”
Hank lifts his head from the foot of the bed, takes in the situation with deep bulldog disapproval, and flops back down, indicating he will not be participating in this nonsense.
“Why doesn’t Hank have to get up?”
“I can only deal with one grumpy waker-upper at a time.”
He hands me my bkr, his sweatshirt, and a pair of shorts.
I drag them on in the dark, eyes half closed, and follow him into the living room.
My shoes are by the door where I kicked them off last night, still beside his.
That shouldn’t feel intimate after everything else we’ve done, yet somehow it does.
“Can I at least have coffee first?”
“I have coffee for you.” He opens the door. “But first.”
He reaches into his back pocket and pulls out a folded strip of fabric. A bandana. Light blue. Hank’s, naturally.
“Turn around,” he says.
“Mmm. Sexy time?”
He laughs. “It’s not what you think. Trust me.”
I turn around.
He ties the bandana gently over my eyes, careful with my hair. His fingers brush the back of my neck as he knots it, and a shiver runs through me that has nothing to do with the early morning air.
“Can you see anything?”
“Nothing.”
“Good.”
He takes my hand. I let him lead me out the screen door and down the dock, my free hand sliding along the railing because I am a woman who trusts this man completely but does not trust her own feet in the dark.
The air is cool and damp, thick with salt. The bay is in that predawn hush where the water sounds quieter.
Jake’s hand stays wrapped around mine, warm and steady. He walks slowly, matching my pace.
I hear the boat before I feel it. The soft knock of hull against dock. Rope creaking.
“I’m going to pick you up,” he says. “I’ve got you.”
Both hands find my waist. He lifts me off the dock and lowers me into the boat, then guides me onto the seat.
“If this is an elaborate plan to dump me in the ocean, just know I will haunt you.”
“Noted.”
The engine turns over. The low, familiar rumble of The Pinch of Tides. I’d know the sound of this boat anywhere.
We ease away from the dock, and the sounds of The Point slowly fade behind us.
I can’t see anything, so everything seems louder. The clang of the buoy bell. The way the water changes when we leave the sheltered bay for the Atlantic. Spray catching my face when we cross a wake.
It isn’t long before I feel the boat slow. The engine drops to an idle, then shuts off.
It’s quiet. Just water lapping against the hull and the sounds of Jake moving around the boat, tying us off to something.
I reach for the blindfold.
“Not yet.”
“Jake.”
“Almost.”
He helps me stand, one hand around mine, the other firm at my waist. “I’m going to lift you onto something. Don’t move unless you’d like to get wet.”
“Well….”
He laughs as he lifts me and sets me onto something solid.
Dock boards.
His hand finds the small of my back, the other holding my arm as he guides me forward. Then the dock ends, and sand shifts beneath my feet.
Sand.
I know exactly what sand after a boat ride means.
We stop walking.
I can feel him behind me now. His fingers slip beneath the bandana. “Ready?” he asks softly.
My heart is beating louder than his voice. “Ready.”
He unties the bandana.
I open my eyes.
At first all I see is light.
Candles.
Dozens of them.
Hurricane glasses scattered through the sand and lining a glowing path through the clearing.
Then the rest comes into focus.
The same view that stole my breath the last time we were here.
The sky to the east is just beginning to wake up, pale pink peeking above the water across the horizon.
Then my gaze lands in the center of the clearing.
Where the blanket and pillows were last time, there are pilings now. A foundation outlined in candlelight.
I turn around slowly.
Jake is on one knee.
In the sand. In candlelight. Sunrise behind him. A look on his face that is the steadiest, most certain, most Jake thing I’ve ever seen.
In his hand is a ring.
I gasp.
“Jake,” I whisper, “is that…”
It looks like the ring he gave me the summer we were twelve and pretended to get married.
He spent his whole allowance feeding quarters into the gumball machine at Hart’s Landing, twisting the metal dial over and over until it finally spit out a plastic egg with a ring inside.
It was shaped like a flower. Pink plastic center.
Clear fake jewels around it catching the sunlight like they were the fanciest diamonds on earth.
I thought it was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen.
“Do you remember?” he asks. His voice is steady, but his hand is not.
The heat of that afternoon comes back all at once. Jake kicking the jammed machine twice until the egg finally dropped.
Granny making us a wedding cake out of stacked doughnuts with a chocolate glaze on top. His mom topping it with a shaker of salt for the bride and pepper for the groom from The Knuckle.
I wore that ring until it turned my finger green and the silver coating flaked off.
“I remember. I remember it all.”
“Let’s not pretend this time,” he says.
I am not crying.
I am absolutely crying.
He’s looking at me with so much hope on his face it almost hurts to see.
“I have loved you since before I knew what that word meant. I loved you then. I love you now. I’ll love you tomorrow, and the day after that, and every day until I run out of them.”
He holds up the ring.
“Emory Madeline Donovan. Marry me.”
The sun breaks over the horizon. Pink and gold spill across the water, across the sand, across his face.
This man.
The one who loved me when I couldn’t tell him I loved him back.
This man has been choosing me longer than I’ve ever been brave enough to admit I wanted to be chosen.
I want to run.
Straight toward him.
“Yes!”
His whole body exhales. Not just a breath. A release.
“Yes?”
“YES,” I say, already crying harder. “Yes, Jake Wheeler, I will marry you for real this time.”
His hands shake as he slides the ring onto my finger.
Then he’s up and sweeping me into his arms and kissing me deeply. I laugh against his mouth because I’m crying and kissing and half falling into him all at once, and he laughs too as he swings me around.
When he sets me down, I keep both hands on his shoulders.
“I have questions,” I say.
“It’s only fair you get to ask a question since I did.”
He keeps one arm around my waist and leans back enough to look at me. “What do you want to know?”
“Hold on.” I look at the ring again. “Let me admire this for another minute.”
He waits while I tilt my hand and stare like it belongs to someone else.
Then I point over my shoulder with my thumb. “What is happening here? On our island? What is this?”
“That’s three questions.”
“It was one breath, so it counts as one.”
He chuckles. “That sounds like a wife thing to say.”
“I’m practicing.”
He laughs with so much happiness, if I wasn’t already engaged to him, that might’ve done it.
He turns with me so we’re both facing the foundation, his arms wrapped around me from behind.
“I bought our island when I came back to Blue Crab Bay,” he says. “Having it made me remember who I was when I was with you. I’d come out here when I was missing you. Which was a lot.”
He rests his chin on my shoulder as I squeeze his hands.
“When you came back,” he continues, “I had plans drawn up for a house. The builder started before you left.”
I close my eyes for a second.
He was already building something while I was still deciding whether I was allowed to want it. He had the kind of faith in us I didn’t have in myself yet.
I lean back into him harder.
He whispers in my ear, “I love you, Mo. I’ll spend my life making you laugh. Making sure you know you’re loved and safe.”
I turn in his arms and wrap my hands around the back of his neck.
I am not letting go of this man. Not after finally making it all the way here.
He rests his forehead against mine, smiling. “You said yes.”
“I said yes.”
His eyes close for one beat, like he’s saving it somewhere.
Around us, the sunrise keeps building. The candles are still flickering, though daylight is starting to win. The foundation sits patient and solid, waiting for everything that comes next.
I pull back enough to look at the ring again.
It’s perfect.
It’s so perfectly sentimental and devastatingly Jake that I want to burst into tears again.
“You had it made to look like the bubblegum ring.”
“I did.”
“Jake Wheeler.”
“Emory Donovan.”
I look from the ring to the foundation to him.
“You built us a house.”
He shakes his head slightly. “I built us a start. The rest is up to you. Whatever you want. However you want it.”
The girl who said thank you when she meant I love you is standing on the island she helped name with the boy she has always loved, wearing a ring he had made from a memory, looking at the beginning of a home he started before she knew how to stay.
And she is done running.
I take his face in both hands and kiss him.
The kind of kiss that isn’t about heat or urgency, but the kind that says all the things words took me too long to learn how to say.
I love you.
I choose you.
I’m staying.
When I pull back, his eyes are wet.
Jake Wheeler is crying, and I am not equipped for this.
“Oh no,” I whisper, brushing my thumb across his cheek. “You can’t do that.”
He huffs a laugh. “Can’t do what?”
“Be emotional at me like this. I’m already hanging on by a very thin, frayed thread.”
He smiles and kisses the center of my palm.
I look past him toward the candles and the path and the beauty of the whole thing, then back at him.
“We should probably go tell Granny,” I say. “Before Mrs. Kravitz somehow gets the news through her seagull spy ring and beats us to it.”
He laughs. Wet and rough and completely happy.
“Yeah,” he says. “Let’s go.”
He takes my left hand—the one with the ring now catching the sunrise every time I move it—and leads me back down the path to the dock.
The dock is new too, I realize. Solid. Built to last. Like everything Jake does.
He helps me into the boat, unties the line, and starts the engine. As we pull away, I turn in my seat and watch the island get smaller behind us.
Moke’s Island.
Our island.
I look down at my hand again. At the ring that looks like it came out of a gumball machine twenty years ago and somehow found its way back to me.
Then I look at Jake. Wind in his hair. Hand on the wheel. Eyes on the water ahead. The smile on his face.
I move over and lean my head against him.
He glances down, then shifts his arm around me without taking his eyes off the water.
And somewhere between the island and the shore, with the sun rising, the ring on my finger, and every summer that built us, I feel it all settle into place.
Every flashlight blink across the water.
Every shell in a pocket.
Every pinky promise.
Every moment that looked small at the time and turned out to be the beginning of everything.
The life I nearly missed.
All of it was leading here.
To him.
To us.